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Plato: Republic (1993)
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Plutarch: GreekLives (1998)
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PLATO OF ATHENS
A LIFE IN PHILOSOPHY
ROBIN WATERFIELD
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Names: Waterfield, Robin, 1952- author.
Title: Plato of Athens : a life in philosophy / by Robin Waterfield. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023004737 (print) | LCCN 2023004738 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197564752 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197564776 (epub)
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197564752.001.0001
For Kathryn my best friend and co-author of my books
“Plato himself, shortly before his death, had a dream of himself as a swan, darting from tree to tree and causing great trouble to the fowlers, who were unable to catch him. When Simmias the Socratic heard this dream, he explained that all men would endeavor to grasp Plato’s meaning. None, however, would succeed, but each would interpret him according to their own views.”
Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy 1.29–37
Preface
Acknowledgments
Maps
ListofPlato’sDialogues
Timeline
Introduction
TheSources
1. Growing Up in Wartime Athens
2. The Intellectual Environment
3. From Politics to Philosophy
4. Writing and Research in the 390s and 380s
5. The Academy
6. The Middle Dialogues
7. Practicing Politics in Syracuse
8. Last Years
FurtherReading
Index
Preface
The prospect of writing a biography of Plato is daunting, and many have judged it a lost cause. The sources are mostly thin and unreliable, the information sporadic and often uncertain, the chronology of his written works impossible to determine with precision. No official Athenian documents survive that mention him. Moreover, Plato hardly refers to himself in the dialogues (as his written works are called) and never speaks in his own name. Nevertheless, as I hope this book demonstrates, a book-length treatment is both possible and desirable. As well as unearthing biographical details, one has to delve into many areas that have the potential fundamentally to impact what one thinks of Plato, such as: What kind of writer was he? How should we read the dialogues he wrote? Is what we call “Platonism” true to its origins? Plato is a household name—a rare status for a philosopher—and he effectively invented the discipline we call philosophy. It would be good to gain some idea of the man himself.
Naturally, many books on Plato start with a chapter or a few paragraphs on his life, but, as far as I am aware, the last dedicated biography in English of any length was published in 1839, when B. B. Edwards translated the Life of Plato by Wilhelm Tennemann and included it in his and E. A. Park’s SelectionsfromGermanLiterature.1 The book you hold in your hands shares with this predecessor little except a critical approach. That is, I do not just write down “facts” and conclusions but also to a certain extent, suitable for a book designed for a general audience, explain what the evidence is and how I understand it, because nothing is uncontroversial in Plato studies. But otherwise my book is different in that it ranges wider and is longer than Edwards’s fifty-six pages. And since the main fact about Plato’s life is that he was a writer, my book will also serve as
an introduction to his work. I do mean “introduction”: finer points of interpretation and philosophical complexities play no part, and I have toed a fairly conservative line on most issues that exercise interpreters of Plato. This is not a book about Plato’s philosophy but about Plato, though, as a biography of a philosopher, references to aspects of his thought are inevitable. But I focus more on general characteristics than the particulars and the ever-contended details. I am more likely to tantalize readers with suggestive and intriguing ideas of Plato’s than elaborate them or spell out their pros and cons.
After about 2,400 years, Plato’s books have scarcely aged; they are as brilliant, witty, profound, and perplexing as they have always been. Most of them are not only inspired but inspiring; they are very enjoyable to read, and even the few drier ones contain ingenious and delightful passages. No philosopher is as accessible to nonspecialists as Plato. I hope that this book will stimulate readers to turn next to reading the dialogues themselves and to find out more about Plato’s work. To this end, I have appended a fairly long bibliography. In terms of my personal biography, the book is a kind of summation, the fruit of many years of thinking and writing about Plato (not that he has always been my exclusive focus). Almost the first article I had published, more than forty years ago, was on the chronology of Plato’s dialogues—a topic that, naturally, has exercised me in this biography. So, although I now disagree with the thesis of that article, the book completes a circle for me.
1. Despite its title, Ludwig Marcuse’s entertaining Plato and Dionysius: A Double Biography (1947) falls well short of a full biography of the philosopher and is hardly a criticalbiography anyway.
Acknowledgments
My gratitude to Stefan Vranka of Oxford University Press extends this time beyond his usual editorial wisdom, since it was he who invited me to write the book and later he gave me sound advice. Lori Meek Schuldt was once again my excellent copy-editor. Debra Nails offered early encouragement and sent me notes that effectively constituted a second edition of her indispensable The People of Plato. I am grateful to William Altman for a typescript copy of his book Plato and Demosthenes: Recovering the Old Academy; to Matthew Farmer for a helpful email about fourth-century comic references to Plato; to David Fideler for permission to use the photograph on p. 126; to Kilian Fleischer for letting me see the pages relevant to Plato’s life from his forthcoming edition of Philodemus’s Index Academicorum, and for consequent email exchanges; to Dorothea Frede for a copy of an unpublished talk; to Ian Maclean for the calculation on p. 71; and to James Romm for telling me about the papyrus fragment of Letter3.
The book was written under COVID-19 restrictions. It is in any case my usual practice to ask friends and colleagues to send me offprints of articles of theirs that are unavailable in the online archives, but, denied access to libraries, it was especially important this time. I am particularly grateful to Andrew Erskine, Alexander Meeus, and James Lockwood Zainaldin for making material available to me from their university libraries; to all those—too many to name who responded to the request for material that I posted on the Liverpool listserv for classicists; and to John Dillon and Sir Richard Sorabji for checking references in the Neoplatonic commentators when the texts were unavailable to me.
Maps
Map 1. The city of Athens
Map 2. Sicily and Southern Italy
ListofPlato’s Dialogues
All Plato’s works are conventionally called “dialogues,” even though some scarcely involve any give and take between interlocutors, and one, Apology of Socrates, is an alleged transcript of the defense speeches Socrates, Plato’s teacher, gave at his trial in 399 BCE. Throughout the book I use the standard means of precise reference to Platonic texts. I might refer, for instance, to Lysis 222a–c. These numbers and letters refer to the pages and sections of pages of the edition of Plato’s works by Henri Estienne (aka Stephanus) that was published in Geneva in 1578. This edition was in three volumes, each with separate pagination. Each page was divided into two columns, with the Greek text on the right and a Latin translation on the left. The column with the Greek text was divided into (usually) five sections labeled “a” to “e” by Stephanus. So Lysis 222a–c is a chunk of text that occupied some or all of sections a–c of page 222 in one of Stephanus’s volumes (the second, as it happens). This convention is followed in all editions of Plato’s works and by those who write about him.
We have the complete works of Plato. There is, these days, a high degree of unanimity among scholars as to which dialogues are genuine and which are not. I count twenty-eight as genuine. This is a good number of titles, but Plato was not an especially prolific writer: these twenty-eight dialogues amount to somewhat over 540,000 words,1 which is about the same as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. By contrast, we have about a million words from Aristotle’s pen, and if we had his lost works, the figure would probably be nearer three million. But prolificness is not the only criterion by which to judge a writer; Plato was creative and original in everything he wrote.
Here is an alphabetical list of the genuine dialogues, many of them named after one of the lead characters who appears in the work. Most of them feature Socrates as the main driver of the discussion.
First Alcibiades
Apology ofSocrates (often shortened to Apology)
Charmides
Cratylus
Critias
Crito
Euthydemus
Euthyphro
Gorgias
Hippias Major
Hippias Minor
Ion
Laches
Laws
Lysis
Menexenus
Meno
Parmenides
Phaedo
Phaedrus
Philebus
Protagoras
Republic (the first chapter of Republic probably started life as a separate short dialogue called Thrasymachus)
Sophist
Statesman (or Politicus)
Symposium
Theaetetus
Timaeus
The Platonic corpus contains other works as well. Ignoring those that were recognized as spurious even in antiquity, we have Second Alcibiades, Cleitophon, Epinomis, Hipparchus, Lovers (or Rival Lovers), Minos, and Theages. Of these, Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus, Lovers, and Minos are, I would say, certainly not by Plato. Cleitophon and Theages probably are not Platonic, but they
are of considerable interest as fourth- or early third-century dialogues, possibly even composed by members of Plato’s Academy, and the same may be true for Hipparchus, Lovers, and Minos. Epinomis, a kind of appendix to Laws, was written by Plato’s student and secretary, the mathematician Philip of Opus, as a commentary on and development of certain parts of Laws and Timaeus. At some point in the past two hundred years, almost every single dialogue that I count as genuine has been regarded as spurious by some scholars, but the two that still most commonly fall under suspicion are First Alcibiades and HippiasMajor. On the authenticity of some of Plato’s letters, see pp. xxx–xxxv.
1. J. Ziolkowski, “Plato’s Similes: A Compendium of 500 Similes in 35 Dialogues; Chart D,” accessed October 26, 2022, https://plato.chs.harvard.edu/chartD.
Timeline
For the chronology of Plato’s written works, see pp. 74–94.
469 BCE Birth of Socrates
431–404 Peloponnesian War
430 Birth of Adeimantus, brother
429 Birth of Glaucon, brother
426 Birth of Potone, sister
424 or 423 Birth of Plato
423 Death of Ariston, father
422 Perictione (mother) marries Pyrilampes
421 Birth of Antiphon, half-brother
413 Death of Pyrilampes
411–410 Oligarchic regime in Athens
407 Birth of Speusippus, nephew
404 Peloponnesian War ends with defeat of Athens
404–403 Regime of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens; Plato comes of age
399 Trial and death of Socrates
c. 396 Plato with Euclides in Megara
395–386 Corinthian War
390s First dialogues written, and proto-Republic
384 Plato with Pythagoreans in southern Italy; meets Dion and Dionysius I in Syracuse
383 Foundation of Academy in Athens
c. 370 Eudoxus joins Academy
367 Aristotle arrives in Athens
366–365 Plato’s second visit to Syracuse, to Dion and Dionysius II
361–360 Plato’s third visit to Syracuse
359 Philip II ascends to the Macedonian throne
357 Dion seizes power in Syracuse
354 Assassination of Dion
349 Plato visits southern Italy?
347 Death of Plato; Speusippus head of Academy
338 Xenocrates head of Academy
86 Destruction (?) of physical Academy by Roman troops under Sulla
529 CE Emperor Justinian orders closure of Academy and other schools of pagan philosophy
Introduction
Plato’s importance as a philosopher is universally acknowledged. He was the first Western thinker systematically to address issues that still exercise philosophers today in fields such as metaphysics, epistemology, political theory, jurisprudence and penology, ethics, science, religion, language, art and aesthetics, friendship, and love. He was the heir to a long tradition of thinking about the world and its inhabitants, but the use he made of this inheritance was original. In effect, he invented philosophy, and he did so at a time when there was little vocabulary or framework for doing so—no words for “universal,” “attribute,” “abstract,” and so on. Moreover, he founded a school, the Academy, which was dedicated not just to philosophy, but to scientific research and practical politics, and fostered thinkers of the stature of Aristotle and Eudoxus, whose multiple influences on subsequent thinkers were profound. The Academy taught philosophy and encouraged research for almost a thousand years, a span still unsurpassed by any other educational establishment in the West. The range of topics Plato addressed, the depth with which he addressed them, and the boldness of his theories are astonishing. It is not just that he raised questions that still provoke us, but he also asked, as a philosopher must, whether it is possible to come up with secure answers to the questions, and even whether knowledge is possible at all. He was concerned not just with conclusions but with how we reach them. He had certain definite doctrines, or theories perhaps, but even they might find themselves tested in the dialogues. This sense of philosophy as an ongoing quest is one of the most attractive features of his work. What is more, these ideas are generally presented in a way that is accessible to every intelligent reader because Plato’s brilliance as a philosopher was matched by his talent as a writer. In later centuries, many thinkers
have written philosophical dialogues, but none of those dialogues has captured the fluency and conversational realism of Plato’s work at its best.
I said just now that Plato raised questions that still provoke us, but the “us” in that sentence consists chiefly of practicing philosophers. It is more to the point to say that he raised questions that should still provoke us—all of us, not just philosophers. In a world in which even liberal democracies can be distorted by fanatical, incompetent, and emotionally immature leaders, should we perhaps not pay more attention to Plato’s prescriptions for turning out political leaders who are both competent and principled? In a world in which information and misinformation are more widespread than ever before, especially thanks to social media and the Internet, should we not reconsider Plato’s insistence that our actions should be based on knowledge, not belief or opinion? When many perpetuators of popular culture drag us down to the level of the lowest common denominator, let’s reflect on Plato’s reasons for loathing both trivialization and the unthinking acceptance of ideas and practices even when they are widely sanctioned by society. Plato was an idealist in that he believed that perfection, or at least a far better state of affairs, is achievable in every area of human life, starting with personal reformation. Should we not similarly devote our energies to improving ourselves and the world around us, so that each generation bequeaths to the next conditions that are healthier and more sustainable than what went before?
Plato’s work generated discussion and responses throughout antiquity and in every generation since. There is still such an enormous output of scholarly books and articles every year that it would take more than a single lifetime to master all the publications and all the languages required to read them. He is read and studied in, I dare say, every country in the world. The indexes of a good proportion of the nonfiction books on any reader’s shelf will have an entry for Plato. Plato was not just important but super-important. And so he has been judged by some of the greatest intellects of recent times.
Perhaps the most famous such assessment is that of the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who wrote in Process and Reality, published in 1929: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” I believe this to be correct, in the sense that Plato invented what we call the discipline of philosophy, though like all great thinkers and innovators, he also built on the work of his predecessors. He could have echoed Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
But let’s be clear on what Whitehead was saying: every great Western thinker, from Aristotle onward, has been indebted to Plato. Aristotle’s debts are more close and obvious than those of, say, Judith Butler, but the foundations of even Butler’s work were laid down by Plato. If the mark of genius, rather than merely great intelligence, is that the field in which the person works is forever changed, or a new field created, then Plato was a genius. In saying that he invented philosophy, Whitehead and I are not saying that he got everything right. Of course not: that would make all subsequent philosophy even more of a waste of time than many people already think it is! And in any case, it is the job of philosophy to inquire, more than it is to come up with solutions. Plato launched philosophical investigation.
Whitehead’s estimation of Plato is so famous that it has long had the status of a cliché. But it is not commonly noted that Whitehead was preceded on the other side of the Atlantic by Ralph Waldo Emerson, leader of the Transcendentalists. Whitehead was ensconced within the establishment, while Emerson was more of an outsider; perhaps this is why the latter’s saying has been forgotten. “Out of Plato,” Emerson said, in his chapter on Plato in Representative Men (1876), “come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.” We note his “all things,” a measure of Plato’s great importance.
I could add testimonials from many others, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who said in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy that Plato and Aristotle “above all others
deserve to be called the teachers of the human race.” I could add testimonials from thinkers and commentators of our own time, but it is the way of things that current philosophers and scholars have not yet passed the test of time and attained the stature of Whitehead, Emerson, and others. So I rest my case on these quotations from earlier thinkers, and on the fact that Republic at least, and often more of Plato’s works, are invariably included in the canon of Great Books of the World. Nor is this reverence for his books a new phenomenon. Most ancient Greek literature has been lost, sometimes by accident, but more often because it was felt to be not worth preserving, in the sense that, in the centuries before the invention of the printing press, no one was asking scribes to make copies. Yet we have the complete set of Plato’s dialogues; not a single word that he published has been lost. Every generation of readers in antiquity and the Middle Ages felt that Plato’s work was worth preserving.
In short, without Plato, European culture would be poorer, or at least it would have had to struggle to attain the same richness. Plato cannot be dismissed as just a dead white male. It is safe to say that, apart from the Bible, no body of written work has had such an impact on the Western world as Plato’s dialogues. Over the centuries, Platonism has reappeared in some form or other in philosophical contexts—in much early Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought; in the ideas of the Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More and Ralph Cudworth; in the slightly later seventeenth-century dispute between John Locke and Gottfried Leibniz; even in the late nineteenth-century “platonism” of Gottlob Frege’s mathematical philosophy. But that is not my point, which is that Plato bears some responsibility for forming and tuning the way all of us think, whatever our gender, skin color, cultural background, or philosophical or political affiliation. In saying this, I am not promoting the chauvinistic notion that the only discipline worthy of the name “philosophy” is the Western version, founded by Plato; but I am saying that, whether or not we know it, our minds have been affected by him. Moreover, I have suggested that he still has important lessons for us—that he should continue to affect the way
we think about many of the issues that currently trouble or perplex us. This book, then, attempts to contextualize the work of this important thinker and to uncover as much as possible what else he did other than write books.
The Sources
How do we know about Plato’s life? What are the sources, and how reliable are they? In Plato’s case, they are peculiarly intriguing. There are three kinds of source: biographies written in antiquity, letters written in antiquity under Plato’s name, and Plato’s own published works. All three of these sources are problematic in their own distinct ways. There are also countless references to Plato by other ancient writers, but they are concerned with philosophy rather than biography.
Ancient Biographies of Plato
Six ancient Lives of Plato exist in whole or part. Philodemus of Gadara, in the first century BCE, included a critical account of Plato’s life in the part of his massive History of the Philosophers that was dedicated to the history of the Academy. What remains of this text, however, is fragmentary: it exists only on carbonized papyrus rolls from Herculaneum in Italy, burned and preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, and the delicate and highly technical work of reading the papyri is still ongoing. Moreover, what remains deals largely with the Academy; most of the details of Plato’s life are missing, and little is added in this respect to what we can gather from the other Lives, which have survived complete. These surviving Lives are, in chronological order: OnPlatoandHisTeaching(second century CE), by the novelist and Platonist Apuleius of Madaurus; the third chapter of the Lives oftheEminentPhilosophers(third century CE) by the biographer Diogenes Laertius; the opening sections of Commentary on Plato’s First Alcibiades (sixth century CE) by the Platonist scholar Olympiodorus the Younger; an anonymous
ProlegomenatoPlatonicPhilosophy(sixth century CE); and the entry “Plato” in the Dictionary of Wise Men Distinguished in the Field of IntellectualStudies(sixth century CE), by Hesychius of Miletus.1
Three features of these biographies catch our attention straight away. First, they were all written centuries after Plato’s life. Second, with the exception of the one written by Diogenes Laertius, they are all very short: Apuleius devotes about eight hundred words to Plato’s life before turning to his teachings, while Hesychius gives our philosopher about six hundred words, including a summary of his ideas; Olympiodorus and the Anonymous Prolegomena come in at somewhat over two thousand words, and Diogenes at about four thousand, before turning to his philosophical theories. Third, they all rely heavily on anecdotes, and they retell many of the same anecdotes, which shows that they were writing at the end of what was already a long tradition, during which these “facts” about Plato’s life became dogma, often of an entertaining kind. So I am little concerned to identify the particular sources on which these extant Lives drew; they all drew ultimately on “the tradition.”
The tradition’s roots go back to the fourth century BCE because biographies, memoirs, and commemorative poems were written by some of Plato’s followers and others in the decades immediately after his death in 347: Aristotle and Speusippus wrote poems; Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Philip of Opus wrote biographies, probably of an encomiastic nature; Erastus of Scepsis and a certain Asclepiades wrote memoirs. In the next generation, Dicaearchus of Messana, Satyrus of Collatis, and Neanthes of Cyzicus wrote biographies, and Clearchus of Soli wrote an encomium, perhaps trying to counteract the effect of hostile accounts of Plato, because they too started early: Theopompus of Chios wrote a work Against the School of Plato, in which he seems to have charged Plato with writing many falsehoods and focusing on stuff that was useless; Idomeneus of Lampsacus wrote a book OntheFollowersofSocrates that recounted gossipy scandals; Aristoxenus of Taras’s Life ofPlato, as far as we can tell from the few surviving fragments, drew on gossipy anecdotes and accused Plato of plagiarism and much else
besides; Phaenias of Eresus must have included something about Plato in his On the Socratics; the Sicilian historian Philistus wrote a hostile account of Plato’s visits to Sicily; and comic playwrights were ridiculing Plato even during his lifetime, though not all their remarks were hostile: he is mocked above all for his obscurity, his dependence on wealthy patrons, and the uselessness of philosophy, but these were standard slurs about intellectuals.2
None of these works from the fourth or early third centuries survive except for a few snippets, but there can be no doubt that they are the ultimate sources for what we find in the extant biographies. After all, many of them were written by people whom later writers could take to be authoritative, especially Speusippus and Xenocrates. Speusippus was Plato’s nephew and succeeded him as head of the school, and Xenocrates succeeded Speusippus.
Other Lives were written over the centuries; the tradition was being perpetuated. But, like their fourth- and third-century predecessors, these works are lost, and it is the later, extant Lives that form the foundation of what we know or think we know about Plato’s life.3 Leaving aside their accounts of Plato’s philosophy, they all cover much the same topics: Plato’s birth, name, ancestry, and early education (my chapter 1); his association with Socrates and other thinkers (chapter 2); his travels, especially to Sicily (chapters 3, 4, and 7); the foundation of the Academy (chapter 5); and his death (chapter 8).
I shall be drawing on the extant Lives in their proper contexts, but unfortunately little of this ancient biographical tradition is reliable; the general picture of the trajectory of Plato’s life is more or less sound, but when it comes to details, the tradition often turns gossipy or downright fanciful. These writers were the ancient equivalent of celebrity gossip journalists. Common sense is the best tool with which to assess anecdotes, and it is not difficult to dismiss out of hand the notion that members of the Academy, Plato’s school, used to blind themselves so that they would not be distracted from philosophy, or that Plato died of shame when he was unable to answer a riddle. Students of ancient biography well know that
sometimes the slanders and jibes of comic poets seep as factoids into biographical tradition. It is as though Monty Python’s “Philosophers Song” were taken to be biographical fact: “Plato, they say, could stick it away: half a crate of whisky every day.” One constantly has to be on the lookout for this kind of nonsense. What is more interesting is what the anecdotes tell us in general about Plato: he was huge in his day, a major celebrity, idolized enough for legends to have arisen about him and for his detractors to go to extreme lengths to try to topple him from his pedestal; and his fame, equal to that of Homer, continued after his lifetime for many centuries.
The Platonic Letters
Of the extant letters supposedly written by Plato, the thirteen that were included alongside the dialogues in the Platonic corpus, possibly as early as the late third century BCE, have the best claim to authenticity, but they are in bad company: most ancient letters attributed to famous men and women are spurious. And indeed, the authenticity of any of Plato’s letters is one of the most hotly contested issues in Platonic scholarship. It is one of those issues that is subject to scholarly fashion. At the moment the scholarly consensus, while falling well short of unanimity, is that even the most plausible of them are forgeries, but in the middle of the twentieth century the consensus was the other way around, and there are signs today that the pendulum is swinging back again. They are not “forgeries” in the sense that there is anything malicious about them, as though the writer were trying to blacken Plato’s name in some way. More accurately described, they are “pseudepigrapha,” or works written under an assumed name. We are talking here of imposture, not fraud; the writer is more likely to be honoring Plato than disrespecting him. The majority of the letters are written to or about the Syracusan and southern Italian rulers and statesmen with whom Plato interacted on his visits to the central Mediterranean.
There remains a significant minority of scholars who believe that some of the letters are genuine. Most of them are easily dismissed as inauthentic, for stylistic or anachronistic reasons. In the case of the corpus of Platonic dialogues, a core of authentic dialogues gained an accretion of spurious ones. This is likely what happened in the case of the letters too: over the decades, inauthentic letters written under Plato’s name were added to a core collection of a few genuine ones. This is a common phenomenon. To take two other fourth-century writers, the same happened with Demosthenes’s speeches and Speusippus’s letters: the corpus consists of both authentic and inauthentic works. The arguments for and against the authenticity of Plato’s letters are often highly technical, and for the purposes of this book I will not go into them to any great extent. Since, as I have said, the scholarly consensus is that none of the Letters are genuine, I will not undertake the dispiriting task of eliminating those that I too reject. I will just explain why I accept the three that I accept.
Insofar as we can guess, the reasons why people impersonated Plato and others varied. They might have wanted to fill a gap in the historical record by composing a letter containing the missing facts or alleged facts. They might have done it just for fun, or to be able to present themselves as the discoverers of an important document, which they hoped to sell to a library.4 Writing such a letter might have been a school exercise. Especially in the case of letters written under a philosopher’s name, it might have been a way of giving authority to a point of doctrine the writer wanted to communicate. The first point to note is that none of these reasons are such as to induce any forger to write at length. This immediately puts in the spotlight the most important of the Platonic epistles, Letter 7, because it is long. In the standard pagination of Plato’s works, it occupies twenty-eight Stephanus pages,5 which makes it longer than eleven of the dialogues. Second, forged letters tend to be bland; the writer does not want to commit himself to saying anything that would betray the fact that he is making it up. Letter7is not bland. It is written with care and a high degree of literary skill; it expresses
far more of Plato’s personality and feelings than is usual in forgeries; it contains insights into Sicilian history that are not available elsewhere; and its perspective on Plato’s philosophical teachings is complex and unusual. The details of Plato’s youthful turn toward philosophy are completely plausible, as even those who doubt the letter’s authenticity agree. The letter is just too elaborate to be a forgery.
Given Plato’s stature, it would be a bold forger who would pretend to know so much about his character and thinking. No forger would have dared to speak about Socrates, Plato’s teacher, as casually as the letter does. No forger would have dared to suggest that knowledge of Plato’s metaphysical teaching is not imparted by the written word—that is, by the published dialogues—but results “from long acquaintance with the matter and from being embedded in it,” when “suddenly, like a light that is kindled by a leaping spark, it is born in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining.” And Plato adds that “there is certainly no written work of mine that covers the issues I consider important, nor will there ever be.”6
These remarks have generated a great deal of scholarly discussion, but there does not seem to me to be anything surprising in them. Despite the vivid language, they say no more than that knowledge or understanding, as distinct from information, cannot be gained from books. The turning of belief into knowledge, and of knowledge into secure knowledge, takes time and reflection on what has been learned from books or lectures, which needs to be absorbed and made one’s own. Plato preferred live conversation and internal dialogue to the passive reception of the written or spoken word, and one of the primary reasons he wrote dialogues rather than treatises is that he wanted to encourage us, his readers, to think for ourselves and to come to understanding by ourselves.
Three other factors weigh in favor of the authenticity of Letter7. One is chronological: he talks of the necessity of resettling Sicily, where the Greek cities had become drastically underpopulated as a result of warfare and forced migration. This was a true crisis in Sicilian affairs, but it was sorted out by the early 330s. So the letter
assumes a situation that was salient in Plato’s day but was resolved fifteen or so years later. The second factor is the style in which the letter is written. Sophisticated and plausible computer-based analyses of Plato’s style, undertaken in the 1980s, suggest that Plato was the author. It would be impossible for a forger to imitate Plato’s style so faithfully in a work of this length. In a looser sense, too, its style is typical of Plato, in that it introduces important philosophical issues as a kind of digression. This is typical of Plato: topics interweave, disappear, return. All the central aspects of Republic— the images of Sun, Line, and Cave; the fundamental importance of goodness in the world; the educational program designed for philosophers—are contained within a digression. And the third factor is that the certainly spurious Letter2imitates Letter7,7 which would be odd if both were forgeries.
While certainty may be impossible, the cumulative effect of these points suggests that Letter7was genuinely written by Plato. For the purposes of this book, it gives us a wealth of detail about Plato’s life, especially his involvement in Syracusan politics. It is a justification of his life as a whole, written as an autobiography; in particular, given Plato’s long association with Syracusan tyrants, he needed to defend himself against the charge of favoring tyranny. Read as authentic, Letter 7 is an impressive and thrilling document that brings us as close to Plato as we could possibly hope to get, and it shows us a man who was not just a theoretician but who wanted to see whether his theories were viable in the real world.8
I also accept the genuineness of Letter3and Letter8, which are consistent with Letter 7 both stylistically and factually. The authenticity of Letter8is also made more likely by the publication of a papyrus fragment containing a couple of lines from the Letter, that dates from the middle of the third century BCE.9 They are nowhere near as long as Letter7—each of them occupies about six Stephanus pages—but the decisive factor is that they seem to come from the same hand. These three letters are generally accepted as genuine by the majority of the minority of scholars who think that any of the letters are genuine. What distinguishes them from the other ten
letters in the collection is that they are pamphlets or manifestos disguised as letters; they are designed to be read not just by their nominal addressees but also by the general public in Sicily and Athens. Plato was doing much the same as his contemporary Isocrates, who also wrote an autobiographical defense of his life and who also wrote open letters on political matters—including one to Dionysius I, the first of the Syracusan tyrants whom Plato met. Both Letter 7 and Letter 8 are addressed to the friends of Plato’s friend and disciple Dion, but Letter 3is addressed to the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius II and consists largely of a series of stinging rebukes, probably in response to a lost denigration of Plato published by Dionysius. Together, then, these three letters, joined especially by Plutarch’s Life ofDion(and Cornelius Nepos’s brief Life ofDion, too, though it adds very little), will form the basis of my account of Plato’s visits to Syracuse, and Letter 7 also supplies us with details about Plato’s earlier life. That Plato did go to Sicily is not doubted even by those who reject the letters because, although Plutarch draws heavily on the letters, he also adds details not found in them.
The wealth of detail we have for these Sicilian visits might seem to create a regrettable imbalance: we are far better informed about them than about most of the rest of his life. But I do not think the imbalance is misleading. The visits to Sicily were exceptional in what seems to have been an otherwise quiet and scholarly life. One may compare the life of J. R. R. Tolkien: apart from the products of his brilliant imagination, he lived the ordinary, uneventful life of an Oxford don. We have Plato’s writings, we know of his Sicilian interventions, and these were the two most significant elements in an otherwise peaceful and reclusive life.
The Dialogues as a Source for Plato’s Life
We can glean little about Plato’s life or character from the dialogues. It is not just that, like a playwright, Plato never once speaks in his own name, but also that the attempt is hazardous. The eighteenthcentury Scottish philosopher David Hume developed a skeptical
